Teaching

Koreans take education very seriously – most kids will go to after-school classes every day of the week, sometimes late into the night. The university admission test is a huge deal – on the day it’s taken, flights are re-routed, and cars are fined for honking. There are even boarding schools for kids who are due to take the test within the next year, where there are classes seven days a week. Apparently the majority of teen suicides happen in the weeks surrounding the test date.

I work in a hagwon, which is a private school for kids to come to after their day classes. All the kids take English names, and come 2-3 times a week. We finish classes at 6pm every day, but I think there are other schools which teach later into the night - it can be tough, because (understandably) the kids are sometimes knackered and bored by long days at school. But at the same time, most of the kids’ English is better than my French - even the tiny ones know some vocab, and can say the date and weather.

I arrived on Monday afternoon, and on Tuesday at 8.30am I had to report for my first day at school. I teach kindergarten classes in the morning, and older kids who come for extra English lessons in the afternoons. The mornings are broken into 20-minute lessons, and my classes normally have about 30 kids each, split into Korean age groups 5, 6 and 7 (Western ages 4, 5 and 6 - Koreans mark age as the year of your life, so for example newborn babies are 1, because they're in their first year of life. And to make things more confusing, everyone gets a year older on New Year's Day - so it's possible that a kid born on 28th December will be 2 years old within a week of being born).

My afternoon classes are much more of a mixed bag – I have Phonics classes every day, and then a range of ages and abilities for the rest of the lessons. My oldest class is Exploring Debate, with kids aged about 13/14 – so far we’ve talked about things like eating disorders, and homeschooling vs traditional schooling. Exciting topics in April include cosmetic surgery (more of which in another blog post) and, only a couple of months late, Valentine’s Day. The older kids are great, because for the most part they have a good enough grasp of English to joke about, or get into interesting conversations (even if the subject matter is not exactly what teenagers want to chat about). The young kids are very, very sweet - they get very excited about foreign teachers, and are always dead keen to volunteer for speaking in class - although sometimes I think they get caught up in the idea of sticking up their hand and screaming 'I CAN DO IT', and don't realise that means they actually have to come up and say something.

I also had one wee girl (aged about 7/8) who needed help spelling her own name in a test.

Anyway, we were studying invitations and excuses in one class - here's what the students gave me: